Why is global warming denialism connected to fundamentalist religionism and creationism? I am not certain, though I do have a hunch. Judging by the frequent association between the phenomena, there certainly does seem to be a connection.

Judging by their websites and their rhetoric, fundamentalist religionists are more likely than the moderately religious or atheists to be politically conservative and economically greedy; anti-science and anti-expert; pseudoscience prone and science ignorant; hateful, bigoted moralists; and, illogical, categorical, wishful-thinking, myth-favoring, magic-thinkers about a range of topics. In short, too many of these obtusely ignorant folk are hateful and selfish. Don't be fooled by the 'God bless' afterthought with which they close their tirades.

Denial of global warming is not confined to fundamentalist religionists, but it is much more common amongst them. I have seen denialism on one atheist website.

I am not a climatologist, though I am convinced by the evidence that anthropogenic global warming is (alas!) a fact and that we must all act to curb greenhouse emissions as much as possible.

This last element to the discussion – that we must modify our behavior is, of course, the reason for denialism by the determinedly selfish amongst skeptics who would rather deny the science than modify their lifestyle. Liberal environmentalists are no happier with the news on climate change than are conservative denialists – in fact, because they are facing the facts, liberal environmentalists are probably more unhappy about the situation.

Data set HadCRUT3 was used. HadCRUT3 is a record of surface temperatures collected from land and ocean-based stations. The most recent documentation for this data set is Brohan, P., J.J. Kennedy, I. Haris, S.F.B. Tett and P.D. Jones (2006). "Uncertainty estimates in regional and global observed temperature changes: a new dataset from 1850". J. Geophysical Research 111: D12106. doi:10.1029/2005JD006548. Following the common practice of the IPCC, the zero on this figure is the mean temperature from 1961-1990. This figure was originally prepared by Robert A. Rohde from publicly available data and is part of the Global Warming Art project.

Be warned about blogs – many are the right-wing denialist blogs of science-ignorant conservatives who seem to imagine that this crisis has been manufactured, not by greenhouse gases, but for some unnamed 'nefarious, liberal, political purpose'. I have yet to see a good explanation for why liberals or environmentalists would invent or exaggerate the crisis.

Follow?

Comment Policy

Abusive, pro-religion, and spamming comments will neither be accepted nor thoroughly read, so don't waste your time and ours.

Mission

Mission Statement. The opinions expressed here are necessarily those of the management ...

Followers

Don't want to be turned on?

This site has Snap Shots installed. It enhances links with visual previews. This might bring you the information you need, without your having to leave the site, while other times it lets you "look ahead," before deciding if you want to follow a link or not.

Should you decide this is not for you, just click the Options icon in the upper right corner of the Snap Shot and opt-out.